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HowTo Speed Up Boot & Increase Responsiveness (Desktop)

Share your HowTo, Documentation, Tips and Tricks. Not for support questions!.
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MeanDean
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#21 Post by MeanDean »

anyone use elevator=deadline and seen a difference?

jongi
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#22 Post by jongi »

I've got this long wait during my boot up stage

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Oct  1 22:52:47 localhost kernel: [    9.124564] udev: renamed network interface wmaster0 to eth1
Oct  1 22:52:47 localhost kernel: [    9.997042] hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout, switching to polling mode: last cmd=0x011f0900
Oct  1 22:52:47 localhost kernel: [   40.258927] Adding 793760k swap on /dev/sda6.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:793760k
Oct  1 22:52:47 localhost kernel: [   40.835790] EXT3 FS on sda1, internal journal
Is this saying that:
1. the hda_intel process started 9.99s and failed at 40.25s, or
2. hda_intel process failed at 9.99s and adding the swap completed at 40.25s?
Desktop: Debian (Sid) 64-bit, Gentoo 64-bit and Ubuntu Jaunty 64-bit
Laptop: Gentoo 32-bit
MythTV: Debian (Testing) 32-bit

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julian67
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#23 Post by julian67 »

jongi wrote:I've got this long wait dur.....
Your support request is about reading logs. This is Docs, Howtos, Tips & Tricks. You should post a support request in an appropriate place.
MeanDean wrote:anyone use elevator=deadline and seen a difference?
I've been trying it and don't like it at all. Everything seems fine until I transfer a big file/archive to an external USB drive. It seems to take priority over everything else and it can be very boring to wait for several GB to transfer onto a drive with slow write speeds before being able to do anything else. I 'm going back to the default cfq....it looks really impressive now :lol:

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MeanDean
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#24 Post by MeanDean »

julian67 wrote: I 'm going back to the default cfq....it looks really impressive now :lol:
:lol: I havent noticed any difference....yet...

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julian67
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#25 Post by julian67 »

just went back to default scheduler.....all is good again. Using deadline I had horrible freezes in games, whole desktop freezes on large file transfers via usb, audio stuttering, desktop freezes during updatedb cronjob...very unsatisfactory. It was pretty snappy if you have nothing going on in the background but who runs a PC with nothing going on in the background???? It's what automation is for.

So I've rebooted with default (cfq). I have rtorrent in a disconnected screen session, external media being used, mail client, feed reader, web browser, midnight commander and moc running in hidden tilda sessions, movie player accessing the external media. Everything is very responsive including 3d games. cfq is fine with me 8)

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Ook
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#26 Post by Ook »

Is there any gain in mounting the CD in fstab with noatime?

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julian67
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#27 Post by julian67 »

Ook wrote:Is there any gain in mounting the CD in fstab with noatime?
No. Don't change anything in fstab related to your optical drives. nd don't change anything at all unless you have some idea what the change means.

The atime, noatime and nodiratime flags are about recording access/write times. Those times are written to the file/directory (or maybe to the journal, I'm not sure but it doesn't matter for the purpose of this question) that is accessed. A CD is read-only, there is no way anything can be written back to it. The atime, noatime, nodiratime flags have no relevance. If you use DVD-RAM or use CDRWs with packet writing then maybe there is some relevance but try not to worry about it ;-)

You're not going to improve aspects of system performance which depend on the hard drive and RAM by tinkering with optical drive parameters.

Bulkley
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#28 Post by Bulkley »

julian67 wrote:The atime, noatime and nodiratime flags are about recording access/write times. Those times are written to the file/directory (or maybe to the journal, . . .
Will noatime use be a problem when the power fails?

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julian67
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#29 Post by julian67 »

No more than anything else......

atime, noatime and relatime are about access/write timestamps. That's timestamps. That's not your valuable data.

The parameter that deals with writing cached data is the VM writeback time. You can easily google to learn about this and make up your own mind if the system defaults are appropriate for you. If you have a laptop, or a desktop or server with UPS, then a longer writeback interval might be much better. If you live somewhere with unreliable power and you don't use a UPS or a laptop you really don't want to increase this.

If you suffer power failures you need to get a UPS.

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Ook
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#30 Post by Ook »

julian67 wrote:
Ook wrote:Is there any gain in mounting the CD in fstab with noatime?
. . . Those times are written to the file/directory (or maybe to the journal, I'm not sure but it doesn't matter for the purpose of this question) that is accessed. . . .
That is what I was looking for. All is implemented and working well. Thank you.

gerry
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#31 Post by gerry »

Historical note about need for atime: when Unix started, computers were still using magnetic core storage. The "read" operation was destructive, so to retain the data it had to be immediately re-written. Don't think we need that these days.....

Gerry

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birdywa
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#32 Post by birdywa »

Should I use noatime on my swap partition?

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julian67
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#33 Post by julian67 »

birdywa wrote:Should I use noatime on my swap partition?
you can try :lol:

no.

You can find references to people doing it but I'm not sure why they bother. Nothing is stored in swap in normal use so there are no directory or file access times to be written there. What advantage anyone expects by using noatime on their swap partition is a mystery to me.
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Swynndla
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#34 Post by Swynndla »

My boot time took 1m31s.
Then I installed insserv (and preload and changed vm.swappiness & vm.vfs_cache_pressure) following the instructions given in this nice tutorial.
Boot time now is 1m29s.
So there's wasn't a lot in it for me.

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#35 Post by julian67 »

Swynndla wrote:My boot time took 1m31s.
Then I installed insserv (and preload and changed vm.swappiness & vm.vfs_cache_pressure) following the instructions given in this nice tutorial.
Boot time now is 1m29s.
So there's wasn't a lot in it for me.
Of those only the insserv change is aimed at improving boot time. As stated earlier using preload will probably lengthen boot time. It's worth actually reading the howto and the references at the end of it before making changes to your system.
Wisdom from my inbox: "do not mock at your pottenocy"

Swynndla
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#36 Post by Swynndla »

julian67 wrote:As stated earlier using preload will probably lengthen boot time.
Good point. I thought it wouldn't be much because you stated it may only "very marginally" increase the time. I removed preload and timed the boot again and now it's 1m26s. Still not a lot in it for me. I've put preload back on as I want it (and at least I haven't increased the total boot time by doing all this and I've got preload!). Again, nice tutorial. Thanks!

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carolinason
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is it an enigma

#37 Post by carolinason »

my boot time is ~16 seconds from a default install on this ~6 year old system, i just don't understand.
- debian jessie 64bit | registered linux user #231826
- x58 | i7-950 | 12GB (6@2GB) 1600 3x channel | geforce gt240 1GB [19" 1440x900] | 256GB ssd / 160GB hdd | 600W

Swynndla
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Re: is it an enigma

#38 Post by Swynndla »

carolinason wrote:my boot time is ~16 seconds from a default install on this ~6 year old system, i just don't understand.
I was timing from pressing the power button (& press enter on grub straight away) to the kde login screen appearing with the login box.

Most of the boot time is spent on doing file system checks on old & large reiserfs partitions on several hard drives. I've also got a lot of services that are started up. I guess debian is so customisable that it'd be quite different for each person.

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Kats
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#39 Post by Kats »

Have anyone tired out Texas Flood Boot before?

http://www.resulinux.forumdebian.com.br/texasfloodweb/

It's currently in a very experimental stage, but I found it to be quite stable considering the warnings. Atleast on my system. It did break gdm for some reason, though. gdm would work as long as I used the system default settings for it and never changed them.

Other than that, texas flood reduced my workstations boot-time from 37.5 seconds to 25. And this was only using texas flood as a boot-speed improver, nothing else.

It's VERY easy to install (deb with a guided install), and even easier to uninstall. One root-command, I think it was texasflood-remove, would revert to whatever I was using before texas flood.
~ I'm down like a clown, Charlie Brown.

Swynndla
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#40 Post by Swynndla »

MeanDean wrote:I would of like to seen some before/after benchmarks for some of the suggestions though.
It's all too easy to feel something that isn't really there, so since I'd been running preload for a month and a half, I decided it was about time to record some times of opening up two apps that I commonly use, so I rebooted, waited a minute just in case, then (using a stopwatch) timed how long one of the apps took to start, and did the same with the other app. Then I uninstalled preload (apt-get remove preload), and rebooted, and timed the apps again. There didn't seem to be any difference at all (nothing more than the variance of my reaction times in start/stoping the stopwatch). So for my system, I haven't seen any objective evidence so far of preload's default settings speeding up the startup times of my apps (although I've only tested two apps).

Edit: I tested again on another app that I commonly use, a big one that takes a while to start up, and this time I did record a small difference (I did it more that once and took the average, rebooting before each one):
preload on: ave = 9.3s
preload off: ave = 10.7s
Maybe the difference stands out here because it takes a while to load as compared to the other two apps, but in saying that, the difference isn't great, and the difference disappears into the noise for smaller apps, at least on my system. So I'm wondering if it's worth running yet another daemon on my system since most apps I start only once a day.

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